Then And Now And Then

Please, spare me your egotistical musings on your pivotal role in history. Nothing you do here will cause the Federation to collapse or galaxies to explode. To be blunt, you're not that important.

Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Tapestry" (2369)

I suppose I can start by telling this story backwards in time. Among the books I've read -- and along with the people you meet, these really will be the only things that promote change in you over the next five years from where you and I are now -- are a follow up to an original series Star Trek episode. Jeff Mariotte's offering Serpents in the Garden (ISBN 9781476749655) takes place mostly on the planet Neural (called that in the script of "A Private Little War", but never said on screen), revisited five years after Captain Kirk armed the native Hill People with flintlock rifles -- the "serpents" -- to enable them to face down the Villagers similarly armed by the Klingons five years earlier. Like most proxy wars -- the novel takes place in 2273, well before the Federation and Klingons had any kind of détente -- eventually all of Neural came under either the Hill People or Villager banner, and now (then?) Admiral Kirk's desire to prevent all out war brings him back there, but it's not quite as easy to stop a war as it is to start (or "equalize" one). Witness our world.

If this were on Wikipedia, you'd likely have already read a notice that starts, "This article is written from an in-universe perspective." Well, I wrote it; I'm in a universe where the events above are in a book that I read, so I'll live with that. After taking nearly an hour to deliver the papers on our route today (usually it takes between thirty and forty-five minutes) and being able to drop off the kids at Grandma's after bringing Martha to work because our van needs a reprogrammed cluster computer -- I mentioned vehicle issues yesterday, but I think I forgot to mention just WHAT we needed to fix it -- and then crashing at home for an hour with nobody there ... ah, it's just like it will be in three weeks when school starts here again and I have to take the kids every day! I'll certainly be awake to do it! And not roasting ... we've had some issues with our home air conditioner over the past weekend, but it seems working well now, thank God! (I say this for Martha, Sarah, and Jeffrey's sake as much as mine -- after hamburger dinner last night we watched the first part of Tin Man 

and OF COURSE Part One ended when all the heroes are in the worst possible situation they can be in (the title character fell through the ice and the others are captive of the main villain courtesy of her winged monkeys -- Tin Man is a SciFi Channel reimagining of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", and we got it Sunday at Premiere Video because Martha said she knows how I love Oz and its many sequels and adaptations. OK, Gregory Maguire's Wicked series is painful after book two, but I digress.), and the kids -- especially Jeffrey -- were rather audible about not being able to watch the rest of it, but it was nearly ten thirty when we got done with it and the kids were fighting to keep their eyes open (guys, you have THREE WEEKS left, I'd take advantage of it)! Anyway, my next two witnesses PREACH IT! have a memoir and a biography, respectively, that I got to finish over last week that I'd say were real eye openers.

Valérie Zenatti (b. 1970) moved from France to Israel when she was thirteen, and on her eighteenth birthday got inducted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as all women there do for two years; men are there for three. The life of a soldier is never easy, and in her first published work and memoir When I Was a Soldier (ISBN 97815999900599) we get an inside look -- well, as much as we can get if we're not in the IDF -- into balancing your life between target practice and sentry duty in that part of the world. Especially when you're growing up in it, as a soldier and a civilian. And I'll spin off that and bring you to an older book (from 1961, so not that far removed from the subject's life) with what seems to be the perfect, most inspiring subject -- a man (1889-1945) who triumphed against all odds to practice his dream of being an artist, only to get rejected by art school. So he left his own country and went north, supported himself by various odd jobs, at war hardly distinguished himself as a soldier, but found his true calling when he was asked by his superiors to infiltrate a political meeting.

Soon he took charge of that meeting, that political party, and that country. One could say he had definitely "made good" (what he had promised himself he'd do) on his return to his homeland of Austria and "made something of himself". And the whole world still knows it; William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of Adolph Hitler (TK 292) in just under two hundred pages, versus the tomes and over-analyses you often find now on World War II leaders and nearly every aspect of it, does not offer sympathy. Shirer was an American correspondent in Berlin until 1941, so he got to see some of Hitler in action ... still hard to believe that someone routinely spouting about national destiny and willingness to do anything to accomplish European and eventually world domination was NOT that hard to believe. I wonder if we're seeing that now.  

I'd almost rather see a galaxy explode, David